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Hunstanton town in Norfolk, England, UK.

Hunstanton town in Norfolk, England, UK.

Hunstanton is a small Victorian seaside resort which lies at the mouth of the Wash on the North West Norfolk Coast.

It is an ideal town for a family seaside holiday. There are miles of superb sandy beaches with shallow water here, the best and safest in the Country overlooked by magnificent striped cliffs. The stripes are caused by a thin band of red chalk, sandwiched between white chalk and brown sandstone (carrstone).

It is unique in that it is the only resort on the east coast which actually faces west! Once upon a time Hunstanton had a pier, built in 1870 it was destroyed by a storm in 1978. The town itself offers something for everyone of all ages, sports facilities, pitch & putt, crazy golf, gardens, walks, wildlife, funfair and regular band concerts along the Promenade and The Green on Sundays during the summer. Market days are on Wednesday and Sunday.

In the early 1700s nobody bathed in the sea, they thought it was not healthy as the sea water was so dirty, but by the late 1700s it became fashionable when several different doctors recommended bathing in the sea to remedy many different ailments. Hunstanton was developed by the then Lord of the Manor, Henry Styleman le Strange, as a sea bathing resort, the focal point of the design was a triangular Green sloping down to the sea. The towns first building was The New Inn, now The Golden Lion Hotel which was built around 1846. Lighthouses have been warning ships of danger in Hunstanton for many hundreds of years, the first one at St Edmunds Point had two towers and was built in the same year as the Great Fire of London, 1666, ironically it burnt down in 1776.

Hunstanton town in Norfolk, England, UK.

The current lighthouse, which is now a private house, was built in 1844, it had a varied history, it was used during the First World War as a secret wireless station monitoring German Navy signals and during the Second World War it was a Gunnery and Observation tower. It stopped operating in 1921 when it was replaced by a lightship.

The lightship was replaced by a fog buoy and remote control light. In the Esplanade Gardens there is a Memorial Plaque which has the names of the 31 people who died in the east coast floods of 1953, an American serviceman, Reis Leming was awarded the George Medal for saving 27 lives during this flood.

In Hunstanton there are the ruins of St Edmunds Chapel, near the lighthouse, built around 1272, around the ruins a garden is laid out for those who local men who fell in action during the First World War and a seat in memory of Edith Cavell who was shot for helping Allied soldiers to escape from Belgium. St Edmunds Church, which was completed in 1872 has nine windows depicting the life of St Edmund. Hunstanton is rich in bird life, including gannets, petrels, eider ducks, guillemot, long-tailed ducks and velvet scoters, seals bask on the sandbanks at low tide.

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